Shuttle XPC SZ170R8 V2: Small but Powerful

Compact, efficient and incredibly powerful if you spring for the right parts, the Shuttle XPS SZ170R8 V2 has a lot going for it. The small form factor of the motherboard does not take away from its power. Even better is its capability as a portable machine.

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Student Council Presidents are usually those student leaders who are well-organized and have natural leadership skills. There are a lot of anime characters who have the traits to become an excellent Student Council President, so Charapedia asked which characters would make the best one. 10,000 people (46.2% male, 53.7% female) all voted for a total of...

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The physical size of the Corsair Neutron is nearly equal to that of any 2.5" drive, which the exception that Corsair has made this device even thinner. At just 7mm thick, the Neutron is thinner than other similar products, allowing it to be installed inside laptops requiring low-profile drives and at the rear of the motherboard tray in certain computer cases.

The bottom of the SSD is entirely clean, with the exception of a small warranty sticker at the corner of the drive. The placement of the sticker is quite hilarious as the chassis is not being held by screws and can be opened without even touching the area around the sticker, rendering it useless.

A relatively large green PCB holds the components of the Neutron drive, which still is about 2cm shorter than the length of the drive's body. The controller can be seen right in the middle of the PCB, surrounded by NAND flash memory chips. The small chip at the top right side of the PCB is a DDR2 cache, with 256MB total installed in the Neutron.

The Japanese Link_A_Media (LAMD) LM87800 controller is brand new in the SSD market and the Neutron is the very first drive which has been equipped by it. The SATA-3 compliant controller is capable of reaching speeds up to 555MB/s when reading and 500MB/s when writing. While the numbers are not very impressive compared to the Sandforce controllers which have been around for almost a year now, the LAMD controller employs techniques which significantly improve a drive's long term endurance.

Micron supplies the NAND flash, in the form of 128 gigabit synchronous type memory chips. Each individual chip holds two smaller NAND chips, resulting to a drive with 32 8GB NAND flash chips and capable of working 4-way interleaving, just as with most high performance Sandforce based drives. The LAMD controller however does not have the same level of compression algorithms as the Sandforce controllers do, which means that the end performance will most definitely will not be the same.